Old worries may still plague new New Orleans

Hospitals hemorrhaging money
Health care challenges and the dearth of affordable housing will continue to influence the pace of recovery.

Nearly half of the hospitals open in the parish before Katrina remain closed, and one is a shell of its former self. The remaining hospitals serving the city lost a combined $56 million in the first five months of 2007, and the projected operating loss for the year is $135 million, says Leslie Hirsch, who took over Touro Infirmary a week before Katrina.

If major changes aren’t made, such as drastic increases in Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement, the city’s hospitals will continue to hemorrhage money, says Hirsch, who worries there will be even fewer choices for care.

Before Katrina, many locals rented homes — garrets in the French Quarter, wings of faded mansions Uptown, shotgun homes in Bywater. For the impoverished, sprawling public housing projects offered shelter to more than 5,000 families.

But Katrina closed four-fifths of that subsidized housing.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development wants to demolish four of the biggest housing projects and turn them into Norman Rockwellian mixed-income neighborhoods. That plan has met with fierce opposition from housing advocates who fear the poor would lose their foothold.

And there’s little prospect New Orleans will become the renter’s paradise it once was.

The back wall of the city council chamber is lined with architectural renderings of mixed-income, multi-family developments. That is the future planned for the eight-story brick Falstaff brewery, where pigeons now roost and graffiti artists leave their marks.

But so far, those plans are little more than wrinkled drawings.

The future lies in the past?
The city’s neighborhoods are repopulating, with and without government aid. But it is a patchwork redevelopment that favors those of means.

In the predominantly black Lower 9th Ward, the city’s poorest neighborhood, streetlights are back on and water is flowing. But while there are houses being repaired here and there, and even some innovative solar power projects being instituted, there are vast stretches of empty, weed-choked lots and rooftops still covered in storm debris.

In mostly white Lakeview, where water levels topped 10 feet in some areas, things are booming.

Harrison Avenue, the main business strip, is fairly buzzing with banks, restaurants, even a Starbucks. Medians once strewn with debris and rotting garbage are now blooming again with crepe myrtles.

Surveys show 47 percent of Lakeview residents have returned, and another 23 percent are working on their homes. Freddy Yoder, a recovery contractor, has not only refurbished his 11-year-old brick Queen Anne Victorian-style home, but he’s purchased several other lots in the neighborhood.

“I work with the Corps of Engineers. I go to their projects and I see what actions are being taken,” he says. “And I am thoroughly convinced that if we’re not there yet we’re very close to being in a very safe environment and a very safe place to live.”

Campanella, the Tulane geographer, thinks time, weather patterns and the insurance market will prove the folly of allowing people to reoccupy the city’s old footprint. He sees the future in New Orleans’ past.

Campanella says more than half of New Orleans is at or above sea level. But while nearly all New Orleanians occupied high ground a century ago, only 38 percent lived at or above sea level when Katrina hit.

Using satellite imagery, he has mapped about 2,000 empty or underutilized above-sea-level parcels covering an area about three times the size of the French Quarter.

“All I’m saying is we have this valuable natural resource that’s being underutilized,” he says, sitting in a grassy lot between two coffee warehouses in Faubourg Marigny.

Higher scores, but school challenges
And what happens with the public school system, long blamed as the root cause of New Orleans’ entrenched poverty, will also shape the city’s future.

Katrina accelerated a process of replacing the corrupt, underperforming system with reformed traditional schools and charter schools. Recently released test results show higher scores among the charter students. But the system is having trouble attracting teachers.

The clean slate attracted John Alford, a Harvard Business School graduate who moved from Baltimore to run the Langston Hughes Academy Charter School. By the storm’s tenth anniversary, he expects 90 percent of the city’s schools to be independently run charters.

“If we do what we’re supposed to do,” he says, “it can be a glorious city.”

Crime remains rampant. Meanwhile, the New Orleans Police Department is still operating out of trailers, and the force continues to lose more officers to retirement and resignations than it can graduate from its academy.

Changes in organization and funding of the criminal courts and public defenders’ offices promise to shore up a foundering judicial system. But with a nation-leading per-capita murder rate, the city has an uphill struggle to present an image of being safe.

MORE FROM PEOPLE

People Section Front

Sad development: The last Kodachrome film lab Mom of boy set afire: ‘His courage is incredible’ Chef Paula Deen hit in face by charity ham   A one room schoolhouse   Boot camp for butlers   One teacher’s life lessons for his students   Father of missing man speaks out   Jill Biden thanks military families   Suleman: ‘Octomom’ name is hilarious   Mumbai survivor Baby Moshe turns 3 People Section Front   Add People headlines to your news reader: